


the last place we left off

by amberwing



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Injury, Body Horror, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kingdom Hearts III Spoilers, Medical Procedures, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2019-12-26 11:17:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18281603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberwing/pseuds/amberwing
Summary: Vexen wakes up.





	1. step one: wake up

Vexen wakes up and the first thing he feels is pain. It crushes him with the surety of a landslide; his bones creak and joints crack; his body is a conduit for agony and it has no outlet, nothing but compression, heat, blackness. He doesn’t know if his eyes are open, if he’s screaming, if he even has a mind anymore, if he’s capable of consciousness when he’s trapped in a feedback loop that is just a voice saying over and over: _it hurts, it hurts, it hurts_

Whose voice?

Whose?  


❅❅❅ 

Vexen wakes up again and he knows it’s him making that sound now; he can feel his lungs expand and contract around pain like a vice, pushing a low, animal moan up his throat. He’s never been so intimately aware of every centimetre of his own body, even when--

When he died, the first time.

When he died, the second time.

Fear blooms in a rush of strange chemicals, hormones, electricity in his brain that he hasn’t felt in. In a _decade_. He’s delirious. He’s dead. But there’s still a voice in his ear, a whisper soft and hot as ashes:

“Hey. _Hey_. Vexen. Miss me?”

❅❅❅  

Vexen wakes up. He opens his eyes.

He is alone. He doesn’t know where he is. Each blink requires mountainous effort, and after twenty of them, he realizes that he recognizes this ceiling. This is the laboratory. He is atop one of the examination tables they had used to dissect--

His gorge rises, and surprise filters through him alongside disgust, fear, horror, guilt-loathing-grief-shameragebetrayal _hatred_

Something between a sob and a scream wrenches out of him, and his body--traitorous, suffering body--spasms. He falls off the table and onto the shattered and scorched remnants of lab equipment that is strewn across the floor. Glass cuts into his palms. Agony tears through his middle as though he’s been skewered for a spit, and he scrabbles at his stomach with shaking hands, trying to wrench the source of pain free.

Instead of a spear or sword, he finds damp bandages. Still choking on spit and bile and his own hair, Vexen looks down at himself, and he--he can’t quite wrap his mind around the sight of carefully applied gauze. His hands are trembling. He finds the tabs holding the gauze in place and fumbles them free, his breath coming in ragged gasps while he unwinds it--slow at first, then faster, _faster_.

His torso is a riot of overcooked and underdone meat, glistening with beads of plasma and blood; he’s ripped some scabbing free, popped some of the blisters that crawl up his chest in strings of misshapen pearls. Ridges of blackened, hardened skin transition violently into wet, raw valleys and back again.

There are too many clumsy black stitches across his belly, as though their tailor didn’t trust them to keep Vexen’s viscera from spilling free.

“Gross, right?” someone says, and Vexen forces himself to look away from the ruins of himself--only to find Xigbar. He sits on the counter that runs along the far wall, legs swinging. His heels knock against the cabinets below with rhythmic, hollow thumps. “Axel did a real number on you.”

In the flicker of the overhead lamp, Xigbar’s shadow stretches and warps along the wall. Vexen swallows back more bile, closing his eyes against the vile burn of it. When he forces himself to look again, Xigbar is crouched right beside him. Too close. Vexen can’t look away from the lurid yellow of that single eye. Pain and disgustterrorpanic rear up in a wave inside of him, and his vision narrows to a thin, blurred tunnel: all he can see is Xigbar’s face, so near, and feel the burnt whisper of his breath.

“I did my best to patch you up,” he says, and Vexen is caught in the movement of his chapped lips, “but it’s not gonna help if you rip it all off again.”

Vexen knows he should say something, ask Xigbar what is going on, how is this possible, how are they _here_ , but the words won’t come. The world sways dangerously, and he curls into himself like a pillbug to try and smother the pain. Xigbar’s dry-rough fingers carefully comb his hair back from his face as he lies there, protecting his ruined center.

“Hey, would you look at that.” Xigbar’s thumb brushes moisture from Vexen’s cheek. “Been a while since I’ve seen one of these from you. How’s it feel?”

“Wrong,” Vexen manages, a bare, cracked whisper into Xigbar’s palm.

Xigbar barks a dry little laugh. “Ain’t it just.”

Time passes in the pulse of blood through Vexen’s temples, the chatter of his teeth. Xigbar strokes his head while he shakes and tries to focus on breathing. He wants to go back to the blackness of before. He wants to stop feeling as though he’s still burning, that at any moment his skin will start peeling again, his muscle blackening, the under-layers of fat melting away as metal sears through his insides.

“I’ve gotta get going soon. Schedule to keep, y’know?” Xigbar says eventually. Vexen’s fingers find Xigbar’s arms, wire-thin and warm through black leather, but Xigbar gently sweeps them off again.

“Where?” he breathes, and Xigbar shakes his head.

“Nuh uh. That’s above your pay grade, Vex.”

What does that mean? But he can’t concentrate on the question; his thoughts scatter with each heave of breath. Xigbar doesn’t seem to expect an answer, just wipes another tear from Vexen's cheek.  

“Don’t give me that. You’re a big boy--you can figure it out for yourself later.”  

Later? An incredulous cough forces itself out of him. Xigbar just laughs in response, and Vexen feels rather than sees him move away. He hears him rummaging around in the cabinets, and he can’t stop himself from following the wild caper of Xigbar’s shadow across the wall. Glass shatters, and Xigbar chuckles. “Hey, it’s your lucky day! Fridges are still working.”

When Xigbar settles beside him again, he blocks out all the light. His edges blur out of focus, and glass-metal-liquid gleams and stretches between his fingers into a sharp point. There’s a soft tick-tick as Xigbar flicks his finger against the ampoule before he fills a syringe.

“What…?” is all Vexen can say, when he wants to scream: what is happening, what is that, what are you doing. His teeth clench so hard his jawbone creaks.

Xigbar leans down and tugs Vexen's arm out from his protective curl. The raw meat of his torso sticks and peels away from it and he nearly blacks out.

“Bottoms up,” Xigbar tells him, a single point of yellow light at the top of a well, a well that Vexen is falling into. The prick of the needle feels like a coin being dropped far, far above him; Vexen reaches, but never catches it.  


❅❅❅  

“You are a fool,” the man in the black coat says. Vexen watches him from across an expanse of stained glass, torn between curiosity and fear. “You don’t understand what--what a gift your life was. You threw it away, and for what?”

It takes Vexen a moment to center himself, to realize what the apparition is getting at. “Knowledge,” he says, rhetorically, because he suspects he knows who this is. Where he is. What they are talking about. “Power.”

“Ignorance,” the man in black snaps. “Madness. _Cruelty_.”

Vexen’s mouth twists, and he can’t help but look away. The glass is different from what he remembers: cracked and worn, shards of colour missing. The shadows that surround them seem soft--velvet drapes that once wished to card through his fingers, to wrap himself with like a king in his robes of office.

A king. He takes a long, shuddering breath. “Yes,” he replies simply.

“You don’t deserve this,” the man in black says. He folds his gloved hands into the bells of his sleeves, becoming a statue--an effigy, waiting. “And yet, here you are.”

“Here _we_ are,” Vexen corrects.

The man in black snorts, and says snidely, “Yes, well. We can’t all get what we want.”

❅❅❅ 

Vexen wakes up.

He isn't in the lab. The light is too warm for that; as he watches, it slowly moves across the back of his hand, painting his skin golden. His hand rests atop a blue blanket. Flannel, he realizes after another while. Soft, but a bit thin.

He looks for pain and eventually finds it, but it's faint with distance. His skull feels packed with cotton. It takes a very long time to find a thought through it, and even longer to act on that thought. Turning his head atop the pillow is a monumental effort. His stubble scrape against the fabric and he winces; when did he last shave?

Lexaeus is asleep in a chair beside him. Vexen blinks, slowly. Lexaeus has a black leather coat draped over himself like a blanket, except there's a massive tear right through the center of it.

Like someone took a sword to it.

Not Lexaeus, Vexen realizes. _Aeleus_.

Something unnameable builds in Vexen's chest, a swelling tightness in his ribs and throat and eyes. He heaves a breath through his teeth, and Aeleus jerks, head lifting from its awkward loll against his chest. He is rumpled and pale, his hair curling wildly around his face in a brick-red halo. There’s a smudge of something on his forehead that could be dried blood.

Vexen wants to say something--but he doesn’t know what. He settles on, “Aeleus.”

“Even,” Aeleus replies, and the solid rumble of his voice cracks halfway through. The name makes Vexen draw in another sharp breath, and he holds it, quite suddenly terrified; if he lets it out again, it will bring everything else with it, and he--he doesn’t think he can let that happen. Not just yet.

Aeleus puts the coat aside and slowly, painfully scooches his chair closer to the bed. He gently pats Vexen’s hand. This close, he can pick out the yellow bloom of bruises on Aeleus’s face.

“What happened?” he whispers, but Aeleus just shakes his head.

“We died,” he says. Before Vexen can try to continue, Aeleus reaches over and offers him a glass of water from the nightstand. “Here. Drink. Before you fall asleep again.”

Vexen tries to take it, but his hand trembles so violently that Aeleus ends up holding it for him to sip from, and he still manages to dribble more down his chin than into his mouth. By the time he’s finished, his whole body is shaking, and he feels--cold, _cold_ , when he hasn’t been bothered by that in years.

Aeleus doesn’t spare him the indignity of dabbing his chin, and Vexen doesn’t have it in him to be offended. They sit in silence again after that, though it can’t rightfully be called silence when there’s birdsong and the far-off clatter of a city coming through the cracked windowpanes. When the shaking diminishes, Vexen reaches for Aeleus’s hand again.

Aeleus lets him hold on. He is solid and warm and _alive_.

  
❅❅❅ 

“So what are you going to do now?” the man in black demands. “If you survive, that is. Gods know your caretakers don’t understand how to prevent sepsis in burns of this magnitude.”

Vexen closes his eyes, suddenly exhausted by the prospect of being here--here, atop this station, forced to think when all he wants is to sleep. When he looks again, the apparition is still there, every sharp angle of him broadcasting indignation.

“I don’t know,” Vexen sighs, and sits down. The glass is warm. “And I don’t think I care.”

The man in black snorts. “Lying to me is stupid even by your standards,” he sneers. He steps closer, boots making dull, hollow sounds against the glass. “You care very much. Too much, perhaps--but that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” He looms over Vexen, half-bent at the waist as if inspecting a specimen from the depths of his hood.

“What we wanted,” Vexen corrects him again, and lies down. It’s not comfortable.

“ _Yes_ ,” the man in black snaps. In a flurry of too-long sleeves and too-long coat, he kneels beside Vexen and pulls him back up by the shoulders with a jerk. “What we both want. What we both have, now. Don’t tell me that you can simply--simply lie here when you know exactly how much of this is your fault!”

The man in black’s voice rises to a yell, and he shakes Vexen ungently, gloved fingers clenched into him to the point of pain. Vexen snarls and jerks his arms away.

“And what do you expect me to do about it?” he hisses at him. “As you so astutely observed, I probably won’t survive this. And even if I do--”

To his chagrin, his voice cracks. He takes a deep breath in through his nose and lets it out, slowly, counting. The man in black watches him, opaque. “Even if I survive,” he says, very quietly, “you yourself said I did not deserve to.”

“ _We_ do not deserve to,” the man in black says. Vexen groans and lies back down again, letting his skull thunk against the glass. There’s a long, silent pause, before the man in black sighs, and in a shuffle of too many heavy layers, lies down beside him.

❅❅❅ 

Vexen wakes up.

There are people in the room with him. Lifting his eyelids even the bare minimum to see takes much longer than it should. There are colours, blurs of shape and movement fragmented by the downward drag of his eyelashes; none of them are distinct enough for him to recognize. He closes his eyes again and tries to ignore them.

“Like… I know why we’re helping these guys,” a girl says. “But I still don’t understand how they deserve all the good medicine. What if somebody actually important needs it? It’s not like the synth materials for it grow on trees, y’know.”

“Yuffie,” another girl replies, her tone patient. “You know exactly why.”

Yuffie groans loudly, and there’s a thump and squeak of chairlegs. “Yeeeeah, but it still sucks. It’s all their fault!”

“People make mistakes,” the other girl says. “We don’t have to forgive them, but… It doesn’t give us the right to treat them without humanity.”

Vexen opens his eyes again, just as slow, and watches as she carefully pulls on a pair of blue nitrile gloves. She is tall and slender, with her brown hair tied neatly back. When she sees him looking at her, she smiles.

“Good morning,” she says. “I’m Aerith, and this is Yuffie. We’re from the Hollow Bastion Restoration Committee.”

“Oh, he’s awake?” Yuffie asks, and there’s more shuffling; another girl, short, black-haired, stares at him from around Aerith’s waist. She jabs a finger towards him. “Hey, bug-eyes. If you make one wrong move, you’re dead, got it? I’m watchin’ you.”

“Yuffie,” Aerith sighs.

“Aerith!”

Vexen does not say anything, and that seems to disappoint Yuffie immensely. The girl glares at him, then steps back again, settling herself in the chair she’s shoved back against the wall. The same chair that Aeleus was sitting in, last time. She pulls her feet up onto the cushion beneath her and folds her arms across her chest, watching him with narrowed eyes.

“You’re… Even, right?” Aerith asks gently. “One of Ansem the Wise’s apprentices?”

Hearing the old name from her is worse than from Aeleus. _Everything_ about this is worse than with Aeleus. He shudders, and Aerith seems to take that as an affirmative.

“It’s very nice to meet you. When we found you, it was...”

She doesn’t seem to know how to finish the sentence. He estimates her to be around 20; she would have been Ienzo’s age when the Garden fell. Something tightens inside of him, tectonic plates and clenched fists.

“You were super gross, like, covered in sores and burns, all oozing pus,” Yuffie provides with glee. “Like something straight out of a horror movie!”

Aerith’s mouth tightens. “If she’s bothering you--”

“Ienzo?” he asks instead, unable to get more than a croak past his dry tongue. “Is he…?”

Aerith glances at Yuffie, and some silent communication passes between them. “He’s fine,” she says after a moment. “One of my friends is watching him while he recovers.” Before Vexen can react, she clears her throat. “I have to clean your wounds. It’s… It’s going to be quite painful. Would you like me to sedate you again?”

The vague inclination to decline flits through him. For all their charity, for all that they are trying to be _humanitarian_ , they know who he is. They know what he did. Who he became. (Who he was, all along.) Something is squeezing his ribcage, forcing him to breathe shallowly, too quickly. They are Ienzo, in that moment, in the labs as everything burned; they are Ienzo’s face, blood- and soot-spattered as Even and his brothers began to eat each other, fear and lust and hunger hunger hunger the meat the bones **_the heart_ **

“Yes,” he whispers.  


❅❅❅ 

“I don’t understand how this is even possible.”

The man in black is lying beside him still, and when Vexen speaks, his head turns to look at him. In the shadows of his hood--strangely impenetrable, considering the glow of the glass beneath them, and how very close he is--Vexen can barely make out the arch of an eyebrow, the twitch of lips frowning.

“You don’t think this is the result of our Superior’s scheming? His Kingdom Hearts?”  

Vexen snorts derisively. “Don’t tell me you believe in that rubbish. I studied the preliminary exploratory data--it was a fool’s errand. That Kingdom Hearts of his was going to be no more than an overblown balloon.”

The man in black rests his hands atop his stomach, steepling his fingers. “But what alternatives are there?”

“I have a theory,” Vexen says. He contemplates the abyss that could be called a sky, here; the glow of the station sends tentative rays of gold and blue and green upward, light through water, sun through ice, that are swiftly devoured by shadow. He has the inkling that if he stares long enough into that darkness, he might find the glimmer of other stations--other worlds.

“...Well?” the man in black demands.

Vexen frowns. “We were never able to capture what exactly happened to the Dusks when they were destroyed. In spite of all laws of physics... “

“Correct. Your point being?”

“Perhaps we were simply too short-sighted, too arrogant.” Vexen sighs. “Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed; we all learned that in grade school. Our very continued existence was proof of it. The fact that we became so utterly convinced that we did _not_ exist… Why is that? How did we not realize that there was no conclusion to be found--only an answer we could not yet detect?”

The man in black does not reply. When Vexen glances over at him again, he catches the faintest glimpse of a smile.

“You know the answer as well as I do,” he says. “Don’t you?”


	2. step two: panic

Vexen wakes to the distant clamor of bells. He opens his eyes and immediately regrets it; sunlight is streaming directly atop him through the open window, and feels like needles being stabbed directly into his retinas. The curtains flutter in the breeze, bringing with it the smell of water and stone. 

The Rising Falls. He takes a deep breath and regrets it. The awful sensation of scabs and stitches stretching is enough to draw an involuntary groan from him. 

“Aha, sleeping beauty finally awakens!” 

Vexen’s eyes pop open again, and through the tears of pain he sees that Xigbar is sitting on the windowsill. He blinks a few times, but when he finally manages to lift a hand to wipe his face clean again, Xigbar remains: a lanky shadow with his back to the open sky, his eye a counterfeit sun. He grins at Vexen, and Vexen twitches.

“You’re lookin’... Well, I can’t say good,” Xigbar says amiably. He leans back on the sill, his hair dangling into open space like a noose. Somewhere far-off, the bells are still ringing. “But a hell of a lot better than last time.” 

“Braig?” Vexen asks, tentative, but Xigbar just shrugs, his mouth twisting halfway to a smile.

“Braig, Xigbar. Whatever, y’know?” 

“What happened?” 

Xigbar purses his lips and taps his chin. Vexen has never seen the point of his exaggerated body language—it’s theatrical and clownish—but can’t find the energy for irritation. His bones feel as though they’re filled with lead rather than marrow; exhaustion and sedatives have dulled him.

“Y’see, that’s kiiiinda a long story,” Xigbar says at last, clapping his hands onto his knees. He cocks his head to the side. “And I think you’ve got the gist of it already. Oblivion was a bust, as you know pretty intimately, then the Keybearer woke up and went completely apeshit on Never Was. Blah blah blah…” He flaps a hand, brushing the details away. “The best laid plans of mice and men, right? But hey, surprise surprise, looks like we didn’t need Kingdom Hearts after all! Though,” he muses, glancing up at the ceiling, “I coulda done without the massive bodily trauma on recompletion. Not what I wanted to wake up to!” 

“Recompletion?” Vexen repeats. The word tastes entirely too colloquial; his mind immediately conjures the phantom of Xehanort, young and smiling in his crisp lab whites, as they clustered around the first shadow they’d captured. “ _Heartless,_ ” he named it, as if it were a grand joke. “ _Nobody,_ ” Xemnas told them as they slowly opened their new-old eyes in the ruined bowels of this castle, and none of them had the hearts to care that it was ridiculous. “What does that even mean?” 

Xigbar’s crow’s feet crinkle as he smiles. He leans towards Vexen, eyebrows arching in some secret amusement. “Does it matter?”

The irritation finally breaks through, a slow creeping burn in his face and a tightness in his jaw that’s swiftly followed by dizziness. He clenches his fingers into his blankets. He can’t deal with this right now. “Go away,” he says. He’s shaking again, nausea thickening in his throat. The bells are still ringing, but they sound tinny.

Xigbar snorts in amusement. “I’ll come back later,” he promises. “We’ve got some stuff to discuss, you n’ me.” With a lopsided grin and a jaunty salute, he tips himself backwards off the windowsill, disappearing into freefall. Vexen feels the tug of magic a moment later—teleportation, not a corridor—and tries to relax. 

Tries—but is jolted back into high alert when the door is opens. He winces, and winces again when he recognizes the girl from before: Yuffie. She holds the door as Aerith follows her a moment later, arms full with a tray of food and tools. Vexen wishes, suddenly, that Xigbar had taken him along out the window.

“Oh good, you’re awake!” Aerith says, setting the tray down on the table beside him. Yuffie sits where Xigbar just had, watching him with her chin propped in her palms. “You’re looking much better today.” 

“You always get mad when _I_ lie to people,” Yuffie grouses. Aerith just shakes her head, smiling, and hands Vexen a glass of water. Thankfully, it has a straw this time. He braces the cup carefully against his collarbone, hands cupped around it rather than holding it up, and concentrates on sipping. The girls continue to chatter back and forth while Vexen tries his best to ignore them.

Once he’s finished the water, Aerith offers him a bowl of something gruel-like. “Do you need help holding it?” she asks, and embarrassment-irritation-frustration coil, spark down his spine. 

“No,” Vexen snaps, and arranges it as he had the water. He frowns down at the bowl in recognition: porridge, lukewarm, with cream and honey. The bland nourishment of an invalid. He hasn’t seen it since his residency at the local hospital, however many lives ago. 

Aerith, tactfully, leaves him to it once she sees that he won’t spill it everywhere or hurt himself. She putters on a nearby desk, sorting through papers. “Your friends are recovering well.” 

That gives him pause. “Who else is here?” 

Yuffie’s attention is drawn away from whatever is going on out the window. She holds up four fingers, then tentatively waggles her other hand. “Four for sure, not including you. There might be one more floating around, if Lea is right.” 

Vexen aspirates a mouthful of porridge.

By the time he’s done coughing, both girls are hovering beside him. Aerith’s brow is creased with worry and Yuffie’s eyes are wide as saucers. His head spins alarmingly. “Do not,” he exhales, “trust him.”

“Who?” 

“Ax—” No. That’s not right. “ _Lea._ ” 

The girls look at one another, and Yuffie cuts Aerith off before she can placate him. “Why? He seems nice.”

Vexen squeezes his eyes shut, but he sees fire nonetheless, pulsing in the darkness behind his eyelids. “Nice?” he croaks, unable to withhold the strange, awful wonder. Laughter struggles to escape him, absurd, involuntary, agonizing. “He is a monster.” 

Yuffie cocks her head to the side, ignoring Aerith’s urgent taps on her shoulder. “Huh,” she says, propping her elbows on the mattress. “Funny. He said the exact same thing about you!”

“That’s enough,” Aerith says firmly, pulling Yuffie away. 

Vexen manages to arch an eyebrow, and Aerith draws them back even further, as if afraid he’ll suddenly lunge out and attack them. A logical assumption—if he weren’t bedbound and on the slow cusp of death. Still, something within him twinges. Would he really?

He thinks of Ienzo, of Namine. Of the replicas, beginning to breathe.

Perhaps he would. 

He lets himself sink deeper into the pillows with a sigh. It takes a bit of effort to bite out, “Please. Who else is here?” 

Aerith watches him with sharp green eyes, and when he doesn’t make any sudden moves, releases her grip on Yuffie’s shoulders. Yuffie grumbles, but keeps her distance. “Ienzo, Aeleus, Dilan, and Lea,” Aerith says, caution and reproach clipping her words. “Lea says there should be someone called Isa, as well, but we’ve seen no sign of him.” 

No mention of Xigbar, nor Xehanort. Somehow, he isn’t surprised. 

Vexen hasn’t died yet. He isn’t quite sure how that’s possible, all things considered, nor is he sure how to feel about it. It’s fortunate that most of his time is spent unconscious, or he might finally gather the presence of mind to decide on that. They’ll have to stop dosing him with whatever analgesic is keeping his pain under control or risk some type of organ failure, eventually. At that point, he can—what, exactly?

Ask these girls to kill him? Do it himself? He would ask Aeleus (or Dilan, perhaps, but not Ienzo, _never_ Ienzo) to perform the honors, but he hasn’t seen him since that first, brief moment.

There are other options than suicide, of course, with valuable endpoints, but given his record he suspects the likelihood of actually achieving said endpoints is very, very low. 

He is not a gambler. He does not throw himself into things blindly. Gut instinct, luck, and faith are laughable concepts; he knows this from long experience. One cannot rely on a feeling—only on data, on the methodology of theory to experimentation to conclusion. He has followed the method from start to finish twice now, replicated the result: deaths he did not choose. Deaths that had no meaning. Deaths that stemmed from his own stupidity and pride, because even without a heart, he was a product of his own unforgivable biases and irredeemable flaws.

Maybe Axel will drop by and take the decision out of his hands.

❅❅❅

The man in black is pacing. Vexen watches him cross the station in figure-eights of such intensity he could wear ruts into the glass and iron.

“How _dare_ he!” he spits, hands thrown up into the air. His sleeves flap around his wrists like trapped bats, revealing slivers of pale skin. “The gall of him! The absolute audacity of that—that duplicitous, ignorant fool!”

“Quite hypocritical of you, to call Axel the fool,” Vexen comments, and the man in black whirls on him, stomping over until they are nearly nose to nose. Cold enshrouds him; frost crawls along the seams of his coat in harsh patterns. Vexen’s next breath emerges as a puff of condensation. 

“Perhaps!” he snarls, eyes a venomous blaze in the blackness of his hood. “But is it falsehood to lay blame on the shoulders of a traitor? A murderer?” 

Vexen merely looks at him, and eventually the man in black sneers. His posture deflates somewhat as he stalks away again to stand at the edge of the pillar, hands clenched at his sides. By the time Vexen has come to stand beside him, the ice has melted into droplets that bead and drip off his coat and into the abyss. 

“But we taught him that, didn’t we?” Vexen asks.

Softly, the man in black says, “Yes.”

They stand in silence for a long time, and Vexen eventually reaches out a hand, out into the endless darkness that surrounds them; maybe it will be the coat he remembers, black and silver and anonymous, and he can pull it back on, pretend that this hasn’t happened. It was simpler, before, when all that mattered was information—searching for it, disseminating it, creating with it.

“To what end?” the man in black asks, as though Vexen spoke the thought aloud. But, perhaps that doesn’t matter here. “Mere satisfaction? How droll. Don’t you even remember what it was like? To create something—some _one_ —with our knowledge, and see nothing but a tool, a statement of our skill? Not as a piece of something far greater, something that can change countless lives for the better? That is what you crave?”

Vexen lets his hand drop back to his side and glances over at him, but the man in black doesn’t meet his eyes. Rhetoric, then. “Is it not simpler?”

“Of course.” The man in black spreads his arms to the emptiness, entreating. “But when has the simplest course of action ever been the right one?”

Vexen looks down. The station has no foot that he can see. This is a spire born from that primal darkness: a galaxy cupped gently by the dark matter of the universe, a petal atop a plunge pool. Were those other, hypothetical stations closer, once? Or have they drifted so far, caught on these ineffable currents of gravity and receding heartbeats, that they can never return? 

His legs feel suddenly weak, and so he sits carefully, letting his feet dangle into the dark. The man in black sits beside him after a moment, close enough that Vexen can hear his slow, even breathing.

“It seems absurd to speak of right and wrong,” Vexen murmurs. He folds his hands in his lap to keep them from trembling. “It’s much too late.”

The silence stretches between them, a near-tangible wall building itself between breaths, phrases considered and discarded. The edge of the station digs into the crease of his knees, bizarrely painful for what is, as he understands it, a metaphysical landscape. 

What would happen, if he were to push himself off this ledge? 

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” 

Vexen gives him the barest glance. His fingers clench tight around one another, knuckles popping. “Yes. But so are you.” 

The man in black sighs. “I was. But I acted, in spite of my fear. Can you say the same?”

“I fear—” 

He can’t say it. He _won’t._ To speak it aloud is to admit that he doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t have a plan or even a vague idea of how he is to move forward. He is paralysed by the dooms he has wrought: no one person can shoulder the immensity of these wrongs, these actions he willingly perpetuated through two separate lives. ( _The people they dragged screaming into the bastion, left sobbing in their cages and soon devoured from the inside out; the people they dissected afterwards, first with scalpels and then with their teeth and fingers and tongues, snapping ribs to find the meat they truly wanted;_

_the worlds, just like this one, that he cracked open easily as eggs—for no other reason than to observe the hungry darkness lap up the yolk of them._ )

He does not deserve to move forward. He only deserves what has been denied him in this strange, lawless twist of fate.

But he is yet a coward. His throat clenches around something hard and unspeakable, something he can neither swallow nor vomit out. His knuckles ache as he clenches his hands together harder, nails digging into skin, bones protesting. 

The man in black’s hands comes to rest atop his trembling fists, gently prying them from their death grip on one another. Vexen stiffens, then gives in, lets him intertwine their fingers, lets him hold on.

❅❅❅

The next time Aerith visits him, she is accompanied not by Yuffie, but an old man. Vexen is half-conscious when they enter the room; he forces his eyes open through waves of distant pain and exhaustion at the sound of their chatter. She carries her usual tray of supplies, and holds the door open with her back to let the old man totter in. Vexen can’t make out much of him other than a massive white beard, a vividly blue gown, and the unmistakable vibration of magic.

The old man stands at his bedside while Aerith tinkers in the background, washing her hands and setting up for another round of wound-cleaning, maybe some debridement. That means he'll likely get an extra dose of analgesic soon, thank every god and their respective heavens.

The old man clears his throat loudly and pointedly enough that he's probably trying to get Vexen's attention. Vexen wouldn't give him the satisfaction on a good day, and this is definitely not a good day. He closes his eyes.

“Ah, yes, I _do_ remember this one. It was an age ago, but one can't mistake that particular—” A considering hum. “Snobbishness, and the nose from this angle. There's no need to be so rude, you know. I'm here to help.”

“Even, I'm going to give you some more painkillers before we change your bandages, alright?” Aerith interrupts. He cracks an eyelid open to look at her.

“This is Merlin,” she tells him. “He’s a wizard. I thought he might be able to glean some insight on your wounds, since they are obviously magical in origin. Is that okay?” 

Her eyebrows are pinched together, as though she's afraid he'll refuse. “I have a choice?” he asks, but twists his arm over obligingly for her. 

Her lips thin with irritation, or perhaps frustration, before she bends her head to the task of injecting him. She's not terrible at it, but his shoulder is a mess of colourful bruises from previous administrations nonetheless. “Of course. You always have a choice.”

Merlin gives an obnoxious snort. A flick of magic draws the chair over from the wall, and the wizard collapses into it, legs crossed, hands perched atop the pale, knobbly knee escaping his gown. “Entirely correct. Don't give her that look, young man. Or me, for that matter! Every heartbeat is a choice—we are all an infinite bundle of potential futures.”

Aerith frowns, but seems to bite her tongue. Injection finished, she dabs the wound with alcohol before turning away, as if trying to ignore the wizard’s well-intentioned defense. 

“I would advise you to review basic biology,” Vexen rasps, “before you start combining it with theoretical physics.” 

Merlin chuckles to himself. He removes a pipe from the depths of his right sleeve and a pouch of something from his left; Vexen’s nose wrinkles at the smell of tobacco as the wizard tugs it open. “Well, you are the expert on biology, if memory serves! But time is my field, and I reserve the right to speak metaphorically if I feel so inclined.” 

He stuffs the bowl of the pipe then lights it with a flick of his fingers. The puff of flame, brief as it is, freezes Vexen in place, his breath catching. He swallows hard and tastes smoke on the roof of his mouth, watches Merlin take a deep inhale and sigh out a series of perfect rings.

Rings were what Axel had started with, he remembers—back when he was an empty teenager in a coat still too big for him, before he’d forgotten what joy was like (before Xemnas told them, “ _What you think is ‘feeling’ is merely reflex. You are a discarded husk. You are **nothing** ,_” and they believed). He’d discovered fire and pantomimed excitement for them, puffing smoke doughnuts straight from his mouth and then biting them midair to try and make Ien—Zexion laugh.

Zexion hadn’t laughed. He had smiled a bit, though, in the very beginning. 

“Merlin!” Aerith snaps, and Vexen finds himself slumped in a different position than he remembers, his head lolled sideways and arm hanging over the edge of the bed. The painkillers are roaring through him in an avalanche, the edges of everything gone out of focus, his thoughts spiraling out of his hands before he can make sense of them.

Aerith is a blur around the bed, and she snatches the pipe out of Merlin’s hands. The wizard sputters with indignation. “Miss Gainsborough—”

“Smoking, in a _sickroom_?”

Smoking, Vexen wonders vaguely. Master Ansem gave him a cigar when he graduated. Vexen had choked on the first inhale and Ansem had laughed and laughed and soon Vexen was laughing with him, the two of them in his office, Vexen still in his suit and gown—or? Had that really happened? He can’t remember the light, what time it was, where the others were. Hadn’t they all graduated together? Why weren’t the rest having cigars with them?

“His lungs are perfectly fine,” Merlin mutters. “Still, my apologies. Shall I examine him?” 

“Please. Even, are you—? Oh, no, don’t fall—” 

The world spins. “Where’s…” he hears himself slur, batting at Aerith’s hands as she props him back up. “Where’s Aeleus? And Dilan and Braig?” 

“They’re downstairs recovering; they’re just fine,” she soothes. Merlin snorts, and the blue fog of him leans over, peering at Vexen too closely. He wants to punch him, suddenly, but his arms are rubber. Useless!

“This certainly isn’t a conventional Firaga burn,” the wizard mutters. “I’d have guessed a Dark variation at first glance, but there’s no sign of continued acidic erosion or sentient tissue conversion. Perhaps a self-taught magician?”

“Axel,” Vexen provides. Their ignorance is atrocious to witness, and their surprise at the name is offensive, frankly. 

Merlin makes an ungraceful honking sound, then clears his throat. “Did Axel conveniently forget to mention something to you…?” 

“Lea,” Aerith corrects, then, more darkly, “He’d better not have.” 

Vexen laughs sloppily before he can stop himself. Oh, it _hurts_ , even through the glossy haze of drugs. “He’s a liar,” he confides. “I told you.” He tries to gesture at the burns, the gut wound, but his arms are still limp as overcooked noodles; Aerith’s cool, gloved hands come to rest on his wrists and still his ineffectual attempts.

“That answers my question, then,” Merlin says. He steps away again, fussing with his glasses and muttering. Vexen wants to bare his teeth like an animal, and feels his lips twitch. “I know a salve that will speed the healing process a tad. Be back in a jiff!”

The wizard disappears in a puff of blue smoke; the sensation of his magic is like shoving one’s face into a dishwasher on its dry cycle, a rush of heat and steam and soap that makes Vexen dizzy. Beside him, Aerith lets out a long sigh. She looks tired, annoyed, a little too thin as she turns away to start gathering swabs and cleansers.

“Why do you bother?” Vexen asks, unable to stop the words from dropping out of his mouth like loose teeth. “I destroyed—every—” and his breath catches in his throat, “Every-one, every- _thing_.” 

Aerith doesn’t answer right away. When she turns back to him, her mouth is a thin line, her eyes narrowed. “You did your part,” she says. Her voice is forcefully flat, and Vexen wonders, in his faraway, foggy way, what she really wants to say. “Would you rather die? I can make that happen, if that’s what you truly want. I’m not helping you out of some—some desire to torture you or take revenge.”

“It would be easier,” he tells her. Aerith’s eyebrows arch, and one corner of her mouth twitches upward briefly.

“Most things are.” She adjusts his senseless body like a little girl patting a doll back into its cradle, then begins peeling old bandages away. Each strip removed is like his skin being stripped off all over again, but distantly, as though it’s not actually him that she’s administering to, but some mannequin.

“I believe that people can change for the better,” she says softly as she probes at the wounds. “That they are all capable of becoming more than they were, and overcoming the mistakes they made.” 

“Ridiculous,” he pronounces with as much gravity as he can muster in this state. 

That draws a laugh out of her, so surprising that Vexen’s head wavers up to look at her. When she catches him staring, she gives him a wry smile. “So I’ve been told. But it’s what I feel in my heart—and isn’t that worth believing?” 

She taps his chest feather-gentle with a fingertip, in time with the treacherous rhythm of his blood. “It doesn’t mean I have to forgive them,” she adds, a fierce glint in her eyes. “Now, I’m going to start cleaning. Tell me if you need me to pause.”

❅❅❅

When Vexen wakes again, the morning and Aerith have left him behind. He feels worn and thin, his head muffled with remnants of pain and drugs, but there’s a subtle coursing of something cool and soothing as well; the salve Merlin went in search of? He catalogues sensations for a moment, trying to unthread the magics he feels in it—a patter of raindrops threaded with the barest breath of cold air, and something else?

He’s still puzzling over it when Xigbar appears at his bedside, popping out of the floor like a mushroom after rain. His teleportation is one of the louder magical sensations, and his arrival scatters Vexen’s puzzle across the ether. He groans and rolls his head back against his pillow.

“Aw, come on! That’s no way to greet an old friend, is it?” 

“You are _not_ —”

“Your fave pal?” Xigbar’s eye flicks over him in curious examination, before leaning in close, hot breath in Vexen’s ear. “Your best bosom buddy?” 

Vexen struggles briefly with the urge to plant a hand directly on Xigbar’s face and push him away, like a too-eager dog at the dinner table, but he barely has the energy to scowl. “You want something?” 

Xigbar does pull away now, eyebrows arching, and yanks the armchair over. He sprawls in it sideways, head and legs dangling over the opposing arms. “Just a check-up. Makin’ sure you’re still kicking. It’s been like, a week.”

“For some reason,” Vexen mutters, closing his eyes, “I sense a distinct lack of sincere concern for my welfare.” 

Xigbar coughs a laugh. Vexen can hear his boots thumping a syncopated rhythm against the side of the chair, like a child. A very dangerous child. “Hey, now! You’re acting like I’m still a Nobody! Harsh. Here, how about this—” The chair’s legs squeak as Xigbar rearranges himself. Vexen cracks an eye open, finds him sitting upside down now, and immediately closes it again. “How about I tell you a little secret?” 

A deep sigh works itself out of him before he can stop it. Ah, here it is. “What kind of secret?” he asks, resigned to his fate.

“Xehanort lied,” Xigbar says, and Vexen’s eyes pop open of their own accord. He looks at Xigbar, hard, and finds him grinning, his teeth bright as lightning. “About, uhh… Basically everything, right from the beginning.” 

Xehanort’s treachery is not a surprise; he figured that out for himself over a decade ago. Xigbar speaking of it so plainly, however, is. 

Xigbar seems to take his silence as encouragement. His eye half-lids to a crescent of molten gold. “Figured you knew already. So here’s the bigger secret.” His voice drops to an indulgent whisper, as though they are little boys again, sneaking into the Bastion kitchens after hours to steal forbidden treats. “He needs Vexen back.”

Vexen nearly laughs, amusement and bitterness tangling together in his throat. “ _Now_ he wants me. The irony is excruciating.” 

“I didn’t say want,” Xigbar corrects, waggling a finger at him. “And I didn’t say Even.” 

He reaches over and taps Vexen’s heart, light as a bird alighting on a branch. “Even has probably been thinking about a lot of important things, since he woke up,” Xigbar says, very softly. “Things like morals and ethics and guilt… And that’s a no-go for his plan. So he needs _Vexen_.” 

Vexen has no response to that, but Xigbar doesn’t seem to expect one. With a grunt, he turns himself over again to sit properly, albeit hunched over with his hands dangling between his knees. “I know what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it, and it all hinges on that.” 

Xigbar is still wearing the uniform, but now that he’s sitting still, right next to him, Vexen can see slashes in the leather, back and side and belly. His death, while probably not as painful as Vexen’s, hadn’t been easy. 

Maybe, like Vexen, he doesn’t see the point of finding new clothes when he is going to die again one way or another—be it by Xehanort or his own hand. 

“So,” Xigbar says, spreading his hands as if expecting Vexen to toss a ball to him. “Thoughts, professor? Have you figured it out yet?” 

Just this, talking with Xigbar, thinking about all the tangles upon tangles of plots, has hollowed him out so thoroughly that it’s a wonder he doesn’t just collapse in on himself. “It doesn’t matter. I am not Even. I haven’t been Even in a very long time. This,” and he gestures at the sad state of himself, a sudden heat pinching his throat, “is all that’s left. Vexen. If you wanted something else, that’s simply too bad.” 

Xigbar snorts, then stands. “Too bad for _you_ , Vex,” he says, and is gone, his step through space discordant along Vexen’s nerves.

He lies still for a time, listening to the far-off clatter of industry. The occasional shadow of a crane sweeps past his window; the shouts of construction workers and the clank of machinery is muffled through the white-washed brick. How far along are they in repairing all the damage to Radiant Garden? 

How far along are all the things that perished? The cities and towns past the gates, the forests and mountains and oceans, the other nations? This entire world and all its people, so easily crushed by the hubris of six men—can they ever recover?

❅❅❅

“Wrong,” the man in black tells him tartly.

They’re still sitting next to one another, feet dangling into the abyss. Vexen breathes in the sense of emptiness.

“About?” he asks.

“Where do I even begin?” Abruptly, he stands, and offers a hand to Vexen. Vexen eyes it for a moment, then glances into the darkness of the hood, searching for an expression to gauge. There’s the vaguest hint of lips tucked into a thin, expectant frown. With a sigh, he takes his hand and lets himself be pulled up, then lead like a child back to the center of the station. 

“Look at this,” the man in black says, gesturing to their feet. He doesn’t release Vexen’s hand, and Vexen is too tired to yank it out of his grip. “Tell me what you see.” 

Vexen looks. The glass is dull and cracked. Pieces are missing between the cames, their gaps jarring as lost teeth. “The station of awakening,” he says dully. “A metaphysical representation of an individual’s heart.”

The man in black makes a frustrated noise and gestures with his free hand. Ice coalesces and pushes them upwards, until they are perched together atop a fragile tower, the sound of it like countless crystals shattering. “Tell me again,” he says. “What does this station depict?” 

Vexen pinches the bridge of his nose. “I told you—”

“You told me _nothing_!” The man in black’s hands grab his arms, squeezing them against his sides. He twists Vexen to the front of their perch, chest pressed to Vexen’s back, hands immovable on his biceps. His voice is a trembling snarl in Vexen’s ear. “What is on your station of awakening, Even? What do you see drawn there, in the—the metaphysical representation of your heart?” 

Vexen struggles briefly, then slumps in his grip. His hair is in his eyes, but he can still make out the colours, far below; despite their distance, the glass is vivid with inner luminescence, pulsating in time to some far-off heartbeat. His own? 

He sees: portraits of Ienzo, Aeleus, Dilan, Braig, Ansem, all eerily serene; the river of his childhood home fading and freezing; the replicas ( _Riku, Xion,_ he whispers aloud) in stasis; himself, haggard, in freefall; and, entwined with all of it—

That distant beat stutters. “You? But you’re... ” A remnant that was destroyed. A falsehood, a mask. Something that shouldn’t still exist. “How are you here?” he whispers.

The hands loosen on his arms, enough that he can turn around. They are chest to chest on this narrow spire, and Vexen can feel the rise and fall of his ribcage against his own. The warmth of his breath. A heartbeat. Before he can think better off it, Vexen pulls the hood off, and he sees—not himself, no, but something that had not been human and had struggled their way back to some semblance of it by will alone, corpse-pale skin taut against bone, eyes poison green and barely contained by their sockets.

“Xehanort lied,” his Nobody says through gritted teeth, teeth that are too sharp, too long, too white. Something twists in his belly, fear and fascination eating one another in an ouroboros he cannot break. “And it isn’t time for us to die again, yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this fic's alternate title is "i love italics and em-dashes"

**Author's Note:**

> cheers lads i love vexen


End file.
